Europe Minister Flint with a Fat Thief and a Ginger Dwarf
Most people who have worked hard to build up their firm or shop don't understand why any company would give rewards for failure; or how MPs have grown fabulously wealthy making claims for second homes and employing family members as wankers.
And so our task today is to bring the imperatives served by our members of parliament into proper alignment with the values held by senior bankers who get even more money than they do - hardly any work, taking expenses, being dishonest, being greedy.
It must be fairly transparent but not openly so. And so our task is to agree global economic rules that protect the enduring values of the money we have stashed away for when the electorate throw us out."
An ugly hypocrite
"Oink! Oink! Oink!"
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Two Fat Piggies Went To (The Property) Market
"All the world leaders are behind me! All the world leaders are behind me!"
"A postmaster who refused to serve his customers unless they spoke English was sacked today.
Sri Lankan-born Deva Kumarasiri, 40, told his customers that it was imperative they spoke English so he could understand them and stop queues building up.
After he went public with his demand, he was forced to leave his post office at Sneinton Boulevard in Nottingham and move to another in the city.
But when Mr Kumarasiri went into work today he was told by the agency that employed him that he had been replaced."
Bloke deserves a fucking medal not to lose his job.
The Penguin
The Bank of England Governor, another deceptively lugubrious-looking buffer blinking amiably away behind the thick specs, avoided any hint of melodrama and was all the deadlier for the deadpan delivery.
What he said, in words measured for impact with exquisite finesse, and in a tone of studied dullness, was this: "I think the fiscal position in the UK is not one where we could say 'Well, why don't we just engage in another significant round of fiscal expansion?" What he meant was: "We're already bankrupt and I'm not sitting idly by while this deranged wastrel leaves future generations in bondage to rampant inflation and crippling debt to save his political hide." Or as Jeremy Thorpe almost put it of Harold MacMillan, greater love hath no man than that he lay down his country's future for his life.
A week today, that heavily-trailed G20 conference will be held in London. Even before Merv the Swerve bowled his inswinging yorker, the cosmetic absurdity of this pow wow was transparent. We are asked to anticipate it as the second Breton Woods, despite the fact that the G20 leaders are meeting for one day when the first BW lasted three weeks in July 1944. The notion that anything more could emerge from so brief a meeting than a meaninglessly bland and abstract communiqué – written and agreed before the event as tradition dictates – was always so foolish that the meeting should strictly be brought forward a day to 1 April.
Once the French and Germans expressed their disdain for any further stimulus packages, however, it took on the pre-emptive flavour of the phantasmal second UN resolution fiasco... a fight between the powerhouses of continental Europe and the Anglo-US alliance in which the battle lines were immovably drawn long in advance of the skirmishing.
And now? Now it's so much worse for Gordon that you could fall to your knees and sob for him. One week today, the self-appointed financial bridgehead between the EU and America – the exact role Mr Tony Blair played to such splendid effect over Iraq – will sit down for what he apparently regards as his last throw of the electoral dice, and have little choice but to argue for what his own central banker has dismissed as a long-range suicide note for the British economy. His only option is to perform a historic U-turn and adopt the more monetarist approach propounded by the Tories and a Governor with whom Gordon, seldom a stranger to raging paranoia, must imagine Messrs Cameron and Osborne are in league.
But it's not just the Tories and Mr King who are cuddling close on this issue. His own Chancellor is snuggling up to the Guv as well. In the aftermath of the Northern Rock debacle to which his response was so languid, Nos 10 and 11 were as one in briefing against Mr King.
Now the allegiances between the three fiscal superpowers have shifted, a bit like those between Eastasia, Oceania and Eurasia in 1984. With Darling and King united against him, Gordon faces his ultimate nightmare. There he is in Room 101, and the wire mesh holding the rats back is rising fast. Small wonder he's frantically trying to ratchet up the terror of terrorism, that classically Blairite diversionary tactic. But it won't divert many of us for long.
Supplying the Newspeak tutorial, meanwhile, is the Chief Secretary to the Treasury. In denying any rift, Yvette Cooper parsed the Governor with linguistic suppleness worthy of the Employee of the Month badge in the Ministry of Truth. "What he [King] said," she interpreted, "is we need to take a sensible approach, which we always do." That, bless her, is precisely what he didn't say. What he did say, in a previous select committee appearance, is, "We entered this crisis with levels of borrowing which were too high and that made it difficult" (his translation of Jilted John's "Gordon is a moron").
He further rued that in 1997, soon after granting the Bank the independence Mr King so lavishly indulged on Tuesday (oh the vicious irony that Gordon's most celebrated masterstroke should mutate into the loudest of death knells), the then Chancellor stripped the Bank of its regulatory powers in creating the tremendously effective Financial Services Authority.
The Governor, then, is now on record expressly blaming Gordon for deepening and widening the slump he has thankfully ceased assuring us Britain is uniquely well placed to withstand; and advising him – instructing him, really – on no account to sub-prime mortgage our long-term economic future for short-term electoral gain.
Much like his namesake, the in- form and imaginatively nicknamed darts star Mervyn "the King" King, the Governor found the bullseye with laconic ease, and at the very moment Gordon was flying off to lecture foreign leaders about the imperative for greater stimuli he is betting the farm on pressing at the G20 next week. That the PM is now pulling in the diametrically opposite direction to the Bank, not to mention the implications of this tug-of-war for sterling, the forthcoming Budget and the Government's general credibility, will take a while to filter through to an electorate that takes a wisely laissez-faire approach to charting the economic meltdown in tedious detail. But filter through, in the usual osmotic way, it will.
If Gordon, ever-more remotely marooned on his fantasy island of vast global influence and unfettered domestic command, backs down and muffles the stimulus hunting cry next week, it will leave him looking, to borrow from the resignation of yet another embittered former Chancellor, in office but not in power. If he doesn't – if he ploughs on with the demand for even more colossal spending and debt – he will be at war with the Bank of England, and at DefCon Two with his next-door neighbour.
There is no obvious way out of this one. He has been on his electoral death bed for ages, of course, ever since that definitive week in October 2007 when he cluck-cluck-clucked his way out of going to the country. But this may well be seen as the week he ran out of appeals for clemency, because the only quantative easing available to him now appears to involve the child-proof lid on that bottle of Downing Street strychnine."
The Penguin
Heroes!
The truth, Prime Minister, is that you have run out of our money. The country as a whole is now in negative equity. Every British child is born owing around £20,000. Servicing the interest on that debt is going to cost more than educating the child. Now, once again today you try to spread the blame around; you spoke about an international recession, international crisis. Well, it is true that we are all sailing together into the squalls. But not every vessel in the convoy is in the same dilapidated condition. Other ships used the good years to caulk their hulls and clear their rigging; in other words – to pay off debt. But you used the good years to raise borrowing yet further. As a consequence, under your captaincy, our hull is pressed deep into the water line under the accumulated weight of your debt.
We are now running a deficit that touches 10% of GDP, an almost unbelievable figure. More than Pakistan, more than Hungary; countries where the IMF have already been called in.
Now, it’s not that you’re not apologising; like everyone else I have long accepted that you’re pathologically incapable of accepting responsibility for these things. It’s that you’re carrying on, wilfully worsening our situation, wantonly spending what little we have left. Last year - in the last twelve months – a hundred thousand private sector jobs have been lost and yet you created thirty thousand public sector jobs. Prime Minister, you cannot carry on for ever squeezing the productive bit of the economy in order to fund an unprecedented engorgement of the unproductive bit. You cannot spend your way out of recession or borrow your way out of debt. And when you repeat, in that wooden and perfunctory way, that our situation is better than others, that we’re ‘well-placed to weather the storm’, I have to tell you that you sound like a Brezhnev-era apparatchik giving the party line. You know, and we know, and you know that we know that it’s nonsense! Everyone knows that Britain is worse off than any other country as we go into these hard times. The IMF has said so; the European Commission has said so; the markets have said so – which is why our currency has devalued by thirty percent. And soon the voters too will get their chance to say so. They can see what the markets have already seen: that you are the devalued Prime Minister of a devalued government."
The coroner singled out Christopher Clark, an MOD civil servant, who made the decision to move hundreds of SCOGs out of the hazardous waste depot in order to cut costs.
"He did not give any consideration to the safety implications. His decision was inappropriate."
The whole inquest would probably be held in secret and without a jury in the future thanks to that loathsome cunt Jack Straw. Mustn't embarrass the government.
"I have to do something to try and justify my existence."
Couldn't Find His Arse With Both Hands
Giving Deidre from Corrie A Hug?
